Slocum’s Luck
Following on from Garham Cox’s comparisons of Harry Pidgeon and Joshua Slocum last week, we stumbled across this beautifully written piece in Wooden Boat Magazine.
Joshua Slocum’s SPRAY sails near Sydney, Australia, where Slocum was given much-needed new sails during his pioneering solo circumnavigation. Throughout his sailing career, Slocum experienced many fortuitous events and near misses, and came to acknowledge his good fortune as “Slocum’s luck.”
A life of near misses and good fortuneby Stan Grayson
Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, probably sometime in 1866, a ship named AGRA faces a rising wind. Launched in 1862 at the redoubtable Medford, Massachusetts, yard of J.T. Foster & Co., the 174′ AGRA is still a relatively new vessel. She is of a type known as a “moderate clipper,” designed to carry more cargo at some sacrifice in speed compared to the “full” clippers, whose heyday is all but finished. Still, AGRA can move. She has turned in runs of 350 miles per day, only about 50 miles less than the fastest clipper ships. Now, as the wind gusts become stronger, Capt. Shaw tells his mate it is time to reduce sail. The crew is ordered aloft and one of them, a young seaman named Joshua Slocum, begins climbing nimbly to AGRA’s main upper topsail yard.
In April 1895, some 30 years after he scampered aloft that day, Slocum told a Boston Herald reporter the shocking thing that happened to him. He “was gathering in the sail, when a gust struck him, and pitched him off. His fall was broken and his life saved by collision with the main yard, which he struck on his head, cutting a gash over his left eye, which is the only mark of disfigurement on his face.”